Subscribers & new-episode email

A Subscription is PodHood's owned-audience relationship: a listener follows your Channel from its public Library and, when Channel emails are enabled, receives each new episode's AI brief by email — summary, chapters, and key moments, deep-linked to the exact second. Unlike a YouTube subscription, the relationship is yours: the roster in the Studio shows each subscriber's name and email address, and no algorithm sits between a new episode and their inbox.

The Subscribe button, subscriber roster, and new-episode email are available on every plan. Email sending is off by default: enable Settings → General → Send emails to send content notifications. This also controls the owner’s first-indexing success or failure email; sign-in codes, ownership verification, and team invitations are unaffected. Enabling does not send past notifications.

How listeners subscribe

Subscribe appears on the Library for every visitor. Clicking it signs the visitor in (Google or a one-time email code) and creates the follow; a signed-in visitor follows in one click. Because subscribing verifies a real email address, every follow is a reachable address, not an anonymous counter.

Subscribing works everywhere the Library is served:

• The default <slug>.podhood.com subdomain.
• A verified custom domain — subscribers never leave your brand to follow you.
• A white-label Library — audience sign-in and new-episode email stay PodHood-operated while your branding leads.

A Subscription is not a YouTube subscription and does not grant Studio access. Your team doesn't need to subscribe: Channel Members automatically receive every new-episode email their audience gets, so each send doubles as a QA pass.

What the new-episode email contains

Each send is the episode's brief, not a bare "new episode is out" ping:

• Episode title, thumbnail, and grounded summary.
• The chapter map: every chapter and typed key moment (Insight, Quote, Q&A, Prediction, Debate, Story), each deep-linked to its timestamp in the Library reader.
• Listen now into the episode and Visit channel to the Library home.
• Your show's name as the sender, and the whole email rendered in your Channel's podcast language.

On a Channel with a verified custom domain, every link in the email is built on that domain, and a subscriber who is already signed in lands signed in — the email reads as yours end to end.

When it sends — and when it never does

PodHood checks your source for new episodes hourly. When a newly published episode finishes indexing, the email goes out automatically — once per episode, ever:

• Connecting a back catalog emails no one. Only episodes published within the freshness window (about a day) notify; importing years of archive stays silent.
• Re-indexing never re-sends. Each episode carries an at-most-once guard, so re-index, edits, and retries can't email your list twice.

The Subscribers page

Studio → Subscribers is the read-only roster of your audience:

• Headline counts: total followers, and how many are currently receiving email.
• Each subscriber's name, email address, subscribe date, and email status, newest first.

Unsubscribe and deliverability

Every send carries the plumbing inboxes expect, so you never operate email infrastructure:

• One-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058 List-Unsubscribe) honored by Gmail and other major inboxes, plus a footer unsubscribe link — both mute the subscriber's email without deleting the follow.
• Only verified addresses are ever sent to.
• PodHood sends on its own verified infrastructure; your Channel's name fronts the message.

Where this fits

• The Subscribe action lives on your Library; the roster lives in Studio.
• To see who's arriving before they subscribe — and which links, searches, and AI answers sent them — use Analytics.
• To hear what the audience wants next, see Comments.